San Jose Spiders Ultimate Frisbee Club Have Steadily Built a Following

LIKE DISC: San Jose's professional Ultimate Frisbee club, the Spiders, have steadily built a following.

Ultimate Frisbee has a lot in common with mainstream sports—it’s been compared to hands-free soccer or football without the impact—but it never quite amassed popular appeal.

Andrew Zill, head of Silicon Valley pro Frisbee team, the San Jose Spiders, hopes to change that. “It has all the makings of a spectator event,” says Zill, a chemist by day. “A lot of people like the grassroots element of Ultimate Frisbee, but I believe there’s huge potential for the sport beyond that.”

As a franchisee of the American Ultimate Disc League, which claims pro teams in 15 U.S. cities and two in Canada, the Spiders are certainly in the right place. The sport’s become a favorite among Silicon Valley tech types: SolarCity co-founder Peter Rives, who’s considered one of the best in the world, WhatsApp co-founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum and Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, to name several.

In homage to the region that spawned a global tech industry, the Spiders were named after the term for bots that scurry through the interwebs to mine data for search engines. For the past couple years, Zill has been cultivating a team of professional players, wining and dining athletes to convince them to pick the Spiders over a rival San Francisco squad.

“It gets very political,” says Zill, who bought the rights to the team in 2012 before spending a year trying to get it off the ground. “It felt like maybe I got in a little over my head at first, but this is something I was interested in on a very personal level as someone who’d been playing this since college.”

Zill’s players don’t earn much—just $25 a game—but the travel is sponsored and other expenses are covered for the 20-plus players to compete against teams across the country and in Canada. This season, the Spiders hold a 10-game winning streak.

“The sport has grown enormously over the years, but we’re still trying to develop an audience for it,” Zill says, noting that it’s garnered air time on ESPN and continues to break from its image as a culty college hobby. Still, only a year into the team’s existence, he’s managed to draw crowds of more than a thousand-strong to the Spiders home games at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. Unlike recreational clubs, which are tough to watch with several games on a field at once, the pro league setting suits an audience.